20 Most Despicable Coaches

20. Isiah Thomas

To be precise, Isiah did more to destroy the New York Knicks in his four years as general manager and team president than in his two diseased seasons as head coach. But it was while behind the bench that Thomas was found guilty of sexually harassing a former team ecutive, and his employers were ordered to pay $11.5 million in damages. In the process, Knicks fans learned of his complex views on race and gender. (It was okay that he called the female ec a “bitch,” for example, because they were both black, which must have provided immunity for calling her a “fucking ho” as well.) After Thomas was fired in 2008, a financial magazine estimated that his failings cost the Knicks $187 million. Six months later, he lied to reporters after he’d overdosed on Lunesta, saying his visit to the hospital was due to his 17-year-old daughter. Stay classy, Zeke.

19 and 18. Bob Farley and Shaun Farr

A few summers back, in Bountiful, Utah, two PONY-league baseball teams, made up of 9- and 10-year-olds, met in the championship game. The Yankees, coached by Farley and Farr, led by a run in the bottom of the last inning. There were two outs and a runner on third. The Red Sox’s best hitter was at the plate. On deck was Romney Oaks, a scrawny kid who was a notoriously weak batter. His team tended to forgive his lousy play, since Romney had a pretty good excuse: From the age of 4, he had undergone treatment for a malignant brain tumor, and the toxic doses of radiation had left him frail. Assessing the game situation, coach Farley consulted with assistant coach Farr, then strode to the mound and told his pitcher to intentionally walk the slugger and pitch to the sick boy. Parents were stunned. Romney’s 8-year-old sister cried. Romney fought back tears himself, then struck out on three pitches. The Yankees win, THEEEEEEE YANKEES WIN!

17. Billy Martin

Martin’s aggressive “Billy Ball” philosophy won him games, but his paranoid personality, his temper, and his relentless boozing lost him jobs and made him angry. Martin didn’t just punch people—he punched them for comically inane reasons: a front-office guy with the Twins who wouldn’t give him his hotel-room key fast enough, a Chicago cab driver who liked soccer more than baseball, any woman crazy enough to marry him. He even tried to beat up his own star player, Reggie Jackson, who he said was “loafing” during a nationally televised game.

16. Matthew Peterson

The upside on Tecumseh, Michigan, high school track coach Matthew Peterson: His team totally loved him. The downside? That’s because he got them wasted at hot-tub parties at his home, where he screened porn, fed mid drinks to minors until they puked, and allegedly encouraged a player to have sex with an all-but-passed-out 17-year-old girl. The Dizzle, as he liked to call himself—as in, and we’re quoting from police documents here, “How you gonna play the Dizzle like that?”—is now serving a seven-year sentence. Fo’ shizzle, my douche-nizzle.

15. Micah Grimes

During his fourth year as coach of the Covenant School girls’ basketball team, Micah Grimes told his team that their main goal was to “love each other.” Apparently, loving thy neighbor was not part of the program. Last January the Lady Knights handed Dallas Academy, a school for students with “learning differences,” the drubbing of the millennium—a 100–0 defeat. Parents and an assistant coach reportedly cheered wildly as the blowout approached triple digits. Grimes was fired, but he’ll be okay. “Gloating tormentor of the meek” is an alluring qualification to list on any job application.

14. Bill Belichick

The three-time Super Bowl–winning leader of the New England Patriots is widely considered the best coach in pro football. He’s also a notorious cheater (he was fined a record $500,000 by the NFL for illegally videotaping opposing teams’ defensive signals), a lousy sport (he stalked off the field before the clock ran out in the Pats’ 2008 Super Bowl loss), and an alleged home wrecker (he was accused of a long-running affair with a woman who was a receptionist for his former employer the New York Giants). “I don’t care if Belichick wins twenty Super Bowls,” Hall of Famer Mike Ditka has said. “He’s an asshole.”

13 and 12. Bela Karolyi (right) and Marta Karolyi (left)

This legendary husband-and-wife team employed a good-cop-bad-cop strategy in dealing with underachieving young gymnasts. It’s just hard to tell who the good cop is: He turns adolescent girls into anorexic wrecks; she smashes their faces in. Bela protégées like Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci have won enough gold to prop up the credit markets. But his smaller-is-better view has helped turn gymnastics into a sport dominated by acrobatic lawn gnomes. Hopefuls training at Karolyi’s Camp endure eight-hour workouts on 900 calories a day. “The young ones are the greatest little suckers in the world,” Bela once said. “They will follow you, no matter what.” Fatty transgressors are given fun pet names such as Butterball, Tank, and Pregnant Goat. Marta’s mean streak may be even worse than her hubby’s. Former U.S. Olympian Dominique Moceanu has accused Ma Karolyi of grabbing her by the neck and slamming her face-first into a phone.

11. Dave Bliss

As Baylor’s head basketball coach, Bliss committed acts of moral depravity so mind-boggling they actually overshadowed A MURDERER! ON HIS TEAM!! WHO KILLED A TEAMMATE!!! In June 2003, one of Bliss’s players, forward Patrick Dennehy, was found dead. A teammate, Carlton Dotson, eventually admitted to killing Dennehy, but not before Bliss ordered his staff and players to slander the deceased by spreading rumors that he’d been dealing drugs to pay for school. Bliss was vainly attempting to mask the fact that he had improperly paid the tuition—a major NCAA no-no—of two players, including Dennehy.

10. Woody Hayes

In his thirty-three-year head-coaching career, twenty-eight of those at Ohio State, Woody Hayes frequently beat the snot out of his players during practice. He pummeled TV cameramen and photographers. He was so pathologically violent, he once slashed his own face with a ring after a loss. During the 1978 Gator Bowl, with the clock winding down in what would be his final game as a coach, the 65-year-old Hayes clotheslined Clemson’s Charlie Bauman following his game-clinching interception. When one of his own players tried to restrain Hayes, he got socked, too. At Hayes’s funeral, close friend and fellow national disgrace Richard Nixon delivered the eulogy: “The incident…in 1978 would have destroyed an ordinary man. But Woody was not an ordinary man.”

9. Charlie Bradshaw

Charlie Bradshaw ran the Kentucky Wildcats football program the way Dick Cheney ran the Bush presidency—with brutality, secrecy, and not a lot of success. Eighty-eight players came out for football in 1962, Bradshaw’s debut season. By their first game, his workout regimen had whittled the squad down to thirty. Bradshaw, a devout Baptist, garrisoned his men in a building with the windows blacked out, where players did “grass drills”—repeatedly diving to the ground and springing back up—on a racquetball court. Bradshaw and his assistant habitually beat and kicked players. More than one lost teeth. Amazingly, even after word of his unique motivational techniques began to surface, he kept his job for six more dismal seasons.

8. Trevor Graham

With all due respect to Vince McMahon Jr., no one in the sports world has toiled more tirelessly to further the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs than track coach Trevor Graham. Currently under house arrest for lying to federal agents in the now infamous BALCO investigation, Graham coached a who’s who of disgraced steroid enthusiasts: Marion Jones (sentenced to six months for lying to a government agency in the BALCO case; forced to forfeit the five Olympic medals won under Graham’s tutelage), Tim Montgomery (former World’s Fastest Man who hit bottom with convictions for money laundering and heroin dealing), Justin Gatlin (hundred-meter gold medalist currently serving a four-year ban for testing positive), and several other runners charged with doping.

7. Marinko Lucic

In the mid-’90s, Croatian teenage tennis sensation Mirjana Lucic was a dominating double threat on the court: overpowering forehand and lethal backhand. Her coach and father, Marinko, was an equally potent double threat off the court: fist-wielding goon and inveterate life destroyer. Marinko first hit his daughter when the prodigious 5-year-old lost to a child twice her age. To punish Mirjana for only reaching the semifinals of a junior tournament—despite playing injured—Marinko threw her into a bathtub and beat her over the head for forty minutes with a shoe. (Then he sent her out for ice cream.) She says he also stole all but $23,000 of her prize money. Marinko publicly denied his daughter’s allegations. Still, Mirjana, her mother, and four siblings fled Zagreb in 1998, speeding to the airport protected by a phalanx of armed guards.

6. Bobby Knight

What kind of asshole chokes his own player, kicks his son and acolyte during a game, and suggests—to Connie Chung—that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it”? The asshole’s asshole.

5, 4, 3. George Gibney, Frank McCann, Derry O’Rourke

For those serial sexual predators in Ireland who never received the calling to become priests, there was another vocation that provided unchecked authority over defenseless young people: swim coach! First came George Gibney, leader of the Irish national and Olympic team, who was arrested in 1993 and charged with raping seven young swimmers (boys and girls both). In the same month Gibney was charged, his friend and colleague Frank McCann was himself arrested for the murder of his wife and foster child. McCann had set his house ablaze with his family inside to prevent his wife from learning that he had fathered a child with one of his teenage swim students. And yet neither Gibney, who was later acquitted, nor McCann can lay claim to being Ireland’s vilest swim coach: That honor belongs to Gibney’s successor, Derry O’Rourke, a two-time Olympic coach who pleaded guilty in 1997 to the sexual assault and rape of twelve girls, eleven of them under the age of 15.

2. David Frost

Few hockey coaches can claim a squad of players as devoted, or demented, as those of Ontario’s David Frost. Over the span of several adolescent years, Mike Je­erson and a few other talented locals, dubbed the Brampton Boys, traveled with Frost from team to team as their loutish coach would rack up wins, get sacked—for forging documents—then hightail it to another league in another small Canadian town. Frost’s tenure as coach ended in 1997, when he punched one of his own players during a playoff game, but his career as an evil Svengali was just beginning. During their next few years, the Brampton Boys would creep out teammates and coaches with their Heaven’s Gate routine: They’d dress alike, talk only to one another, and ignore their coach’s instructions in favor of hand signals Frost ashed from the stands. Even so, by 2000 two of them—Mike Jeff­erson and Sheldon Keefe—were drafted into the NHL. Who acted as their new agent? The uniquely unqualified Dave Frost. Je­erson mucked around with the New Jersey Devils for a couple of unhappy seasons—a period made grimmer when his parents considered criminal charges against Frost for sexually exploiting Mike’s 13-year-old brother.

1. Mark Downs Jr.

A thousand Bobby Knights coaching for a thousand years couldn’t pile up enough dark deeds to touch the devilry this T-ball coach—that’s right, T-ball—conjured one afternoon in Dunbar, Pennsylvania. On that 2005 day, 27-year-old Mark Downs Jr. offered one of his Falcons a cash bonus to injure a player on his own team. Downs instructed 8-year-old Keith Reese Jr. to use the pregame warm-up to bean 9-year-old Harry Bowers, who was autistic and visually impaired, so he couldn’t take the field in a crucial playoff game. Explains Keith: “Mark told me that if I hit Harry in the face with the ball, he’d pay me $25 and then Harry would be out of the game.” When his first attempt nailed his teammate in the groin, Downs told Keith to “try hitting him harder.” The next ball struck Harry’s ear, drawing blood and sending him to the hospital. Downs, father of four (including two girls who played for the Falcons), was charged with criminal solicitation to commit aggravated assault. Harry’s mom says the incident left her son scared of sports. Final score: Evil 1, Humanity 0.

To be precise, Isiah did more to destroy the New York Knicks in his four years as general manager and team president than in his two diseased seasons as head coach. But it was while behind the bench that Thomas was found guilty of sexually harassing a former team ecutive, and his employers were ordered to pay $11.5 million in damages. In the process, Knicks fans learned of his complex views on race and gender. (It was okay that he called the female ec a “bitch,” for example, because they were both black, which must have provided immunity for calling her a “fucking ho” as well.) After Thomas was fired in 2008, a financial magazine estimated that his failings cost the Knicks $187 million. Six months later, he lied to reporters after he’d overdosed on Lunesta, saying his visit to the hospital was due to his 17-year-old daughter. Stay classy, Zeke.